Interviews and shorts.

Pointing to his excellent interview with Wim Wenders, Jeffrey Overstreet notes that Wings of Desire is his favorite film. I don't know if it'd be my own absolute favorite, but it's certainly up there in the top five and I would agree with Michael Atkinson when he recently wrote in the Voice that the film is "a sui generis, all-German masterpiece [Wenders] has tried and failed to regenerate since."

What makes Jeffrey's interview unique among the many interviews with Wenders is that he gets the director to talk about his faith (not exactly a surprise since the interview was conducted for Christianity Today). I would guess that many cinephiles who discern a greater sense of a moral system at work in Wenders's films than in those of, say, the other New German Cinema directors he's most often associated with would ascribe it to some general liberal humanism common to his postwar, anti-fascist generation. But Wenders is a Christian, the non-evangelical kind, who says modest and reasonable things like, "It's the nature of Christianity that it needs to work through conviction, and because of the way you approach it, and not by trying to become a missionary through your work."

So that makes his comments on Wings of Desire stand out all the more:

There was no explanation for the powerful impact that these figures had on audiences. What I had taken for a metaphor had, sort of miraculously, materialized. So I came to terms with the fact that the invisible was powerfully working in movies. I just had to let it happen. You can't make it happen. I don't think you can consciously evoke that. At least, I didn't.

Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie, Yazhou Zhoukan's interview with Wong Kar-wai for Indiantelevision.com: "Today, the future for Hong Kong's film industry lies very much in mainland China where there is a population of 1.3 billion who speak Putonghua or Mandarin. Following the opening up of mainland China's film industry to Hong Kong under CEPA (Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement), coupled with the gradual easing of restrictions in the market, the mainland China is a good way out for Hong Kong's film industry."

Also via Ray: Nigel Andrews's talk with Tommy Lee Jones for the Financial Times and a clip from a letter by William Shawn's sons concerning their father's depiction in Capote.

"I saw Somebodies at the Cleveland International Film Festival last weekend," writes Brendon Connelly at his site, film ick. "It was, without a doubt, the funniest film I saw during the event. Admittedly, the Fest had a particularly weak line-up this year, but a good, solid laugh is nothing to be sniffed at, and Somebodies gave me a number." So he contacted director Hadjii and they've had a good, long conversation via email.

Michael Guillen talks with Sir! No Sir! director David Zeiger.

For In Focus, Mike Russell talks at length with JJ Abrams about Alias and Lost but mostly about how he came to re-imagine and direct Mission: Impossible III.

"For more than 30 years - not under the radar but often just over it - James Toback has been putting together one of the smartest, most idiosyncratic and most thoroughly satisfying bodies of work in contemporary American cinema," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Unknown to many, appreciated as a clever eccentric by others, Toback is an important auteur who is finally getting his due. On Friday, a documentary about his career, The Outsider, directed by Nicholas Jarecki, will make its world theatrical premiere at the Roxie."

Karen Durbin talks with Mary Harron "about why The Notorious Bettie Page bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex."

Also in the New York Times:

• Edward Wyatt: "Some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking [e.g., Ken Burns, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt] have denounced a recent agreement between the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime Networks Inc. that they say restricts makers of films and television shows using Smithsonian materials from offering their work to public television or other non-Showtime broadcast outlets."

• "[T]he baseball picture is not, to put it gently, one of the distinguished genres in cinema history." And yet here comes a MoMA series, Baseball and American Culture, for Terrence Rafferty to preview.

• Michael Janofsky, who's reported on tobacco industry, on the libertarian message of both Thank You for Smoking and Big Tobacco. Related online viewing tip: Shadowplay's gorgeous opening title sequence, via Anne Thompson. As for the film itself, Chuck Tryon finds it "entertaining but hollow."

• Anuj Desai preps readers for Asha Bhosle's performance at Carnegie Hall.

• Virginia Heffernan goes to the Tokyo International Anime Fair.

• John Clark on how DVD keeps alive some performances actors probably wish were long dead and buried.

Jacques Rivette's Out 1: Noli Me Tangere may well not have been screened for 35 years, thanks most probably to its length - 12 hours and 20 minutes. But it'll screen towards the end of the month (in separate parts) at the National Film Theatre in London, Blogging for the Guardian's Culture Vulture, Rupert Jones has a quick primer.

Filmbrain: "As depraved, unpleasant and (at times) offensive as they are, Kim [Ki-duk]'s earlier films are far more interesting than the polished ones, and in their own unique way say quite a bit about Korean ideas of masculinity."

David Lipsky meets Heath Ledger and turns in a longish profile: "Subtract the romance, and Ledger had been Ennis since the moment he left his dad's garage."

Also in the Observer:

• Pink on her "Stupid Girls" video: "I wanted to make the point that there is more for young impressionable girls to aspire to than dancing in a video next to 50 Cent.... Ultimately it's a fun song but it has sparked controversy, and I've spent a lot of time defending myself."

• "There are now five Hollywood projects about Iraq, driven by A-list names like such as Ridley Scott and Samuel L Jackson," writes Olly Blackburn. "But it remains to be seen whether bigger films have the same incisiveness, passion and wit." As Joe Dante's Homecoming, that is.

• Jay Raynor: "It has been claimed, time and again, that there are four million cameras in Britain and that we are each of us likely to be caught on them 300 times a day, though even the academic who came up with those numbers admits he doesn't know for sure."

• Two face-offs: Paul Harris on Clooney vs Gawker and Ned Tempko on Spike vs Condi.

Anthony Kaufman: "Why Wall Street Journal readers should have any interest whatsoever in John Waters or his favorite foreign films totally escapes me, but here you go."

Aquarello introduces the lineup for the New York African Film Festival by recalling the best of last year's.

"[T]here's a history between Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster and myself, so objectivity (if not caution) is hereby thrown to the wind." Ray Young at Flickhead.

"And the losers are..." Edward Copeland has counted the ballots, 107 in all, and come up with the list of "the 20 best picture winners that received the most points for the worst best pictures of all time."

Another list: Votes are in from Star-Telegram readers on the scariest movies ever.

And another: The Boston Herald's Stephen Schaefer lists the movies poked at in the upcoming Scary Movie 4.

Peter Howell in the Toronto Star: "But what really came to mind while reading The Film Snob's Dictionary by that Mexican pool was how hard it is now to be snooty about film. In an age of DVD film commentaries, where everything from the camera aperture to the catering are discussed at mind-numbing length, and where almost everything ever made will soon be downloadable into an iPod, how can any movie know-it-all still enjoy the smug feeling, the sheer frisson, of actually knowing more than the average slob?" Via Movie City News.

In Salon, Heather Havrilesky urges you to catch City of Men, a hit series in Brazil from, yes, City of God co-directors Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, premiering on the Sundance Channel on Tuesday and "unlike anything else you've ever seen on TV."

Intelligence, whose director, Allen Martinez, Jerry Lentz interviews in his first dispatch from Method Fest, has won an award for best short narrative at the Silver Lake Film Festival.

Sean Smith and Jac Chebatoris in Newsweek: "United 93 is the first feature film to deal explicitly with the events of September 11, 2001, and is certain to ignite an emotional debate before and after it opens on April 28. Is it too soon? Should the film have been made at all? More to the point, will anyone want to see it?" That's the most important of those three questions?

Online listening tip. NPR's conversation with Spike Lee.

Online viewing tip. Masters of Cinema: "[Bruno] Dumont's new film Flanders is complete and ready for this year's Cannes Film Festival. A trailer for it can be viewed here (Quicktime 7 required) - if you get a load of code, instead of the movie, paste the URL directly into Quicktime Player."

Posted by dwhudson at April 2, 2006 12:49 PM